Hi, my name is Dick Ludwig.
I'm a Business Development Manager at Keysight Technologies
in the area of autonomous vehicles and
I specifically deal with automotive cybersecurity.
As cars are growing more and more connected,
some of the things that we're seeing is that there are more and more opportunities
for cybercriminals to gain access to either a vehicle's information systems
or a vehicle's control systems.
Obviously, the nightmare-type control issue would be a cybercriminal
taking control of the brakes while you're driving
or disabling the brake lights so that the car behind you rear-ends you.
Obviously, you could have somebody take control of the steering
and drive you off the road.
Some of those are less likely to happen
because they're more higher priorities for the automakers,
but some of the things that you could see happen very easily,
you connect your phone to your rental car.
You bring that rental car back into the rental car dealership,
and then somebody either at the dealership
or the next user of that rental car, actually steals access to your contact information.
There are a lot of different levels that we can talk about
when we talk about how a cybercriminal can attack a vehicle.
As far as taking control of a vehicle is concerned,
there are multiple interfaces.
We have Wi-Fi interfaces in cars now, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy,
cellular accesses, both 4G and 5G.
We have CANbus. CANbus is a legacy bus that controls most of the vehicle's control systems.
There's a very easy access point in most vehicles for the CANbus
called the OBD2 port.
It's something that service centers use to diagnose issues with the vehicle.
You can plug something into the OBD2 port
and you can gain access to a stream of data coming out of the vehicle,
but that can get you onto the bus,
and getting you onto the bus is really the first step into taking control of the vehicle.
Almost all the systems on a car are on either a different network
or they're in a different portion of the network.
It's not like you're taking control of a central computer.
There are multiple ECUs (electronic control units)
throughout the vehicle
or telematics control units throughout the vehicle.
You would most likely be accessing one of those vehicle subcomponents.
For a moving vehicle, it's obviously more difficult.
The most nightmare control scenarios that we talked about
were steering the drivers off the road,
disabling brake lights.
Something like that would have to be something where
somebody gained access to the vehicle while it was stationary,
input some kind of malicious code into the vehicle itself,
and then took control of the vehicle through that malicious code they input.
It's unlikely that somebody is going to be able to access your vehicle
while you're driving.
It's not impossible because of all the different interfaces,
but it's just less likely.
Obviously, the OEMs [original equipment manufactureres] are very concerned about this.
It very much affects their reputation.
Car buyers are loyal to OEMs and that loyalty only goes so far.
If you hear that one of the Big Three got hacked,
you might be more inclined to buy from one of the other two.
Obviously, this industry is changing.
OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers are now coming to the realization
that they're going to have to secure their vehicles against cybercriminals.
Cybercriminals didn't used to have access to systems like power steering.
Power steering is now controlled by an electronics control unit,
which is a hackable system.
It's something that a cybercriminal can get into,
and it's something that the industry is having to adapt to
and they're having to adapt quickly.